Why this quiet corner of the Vineyard carries a new name.
The Land That Was Quiet
For years, this was simply "Trapps Pond" — a corner of Edgartown that few could even place, though it sits minutes from State Beach, the bike path, and the heart of downtown.
For generations it was one family's land, held quietly, with a single house upon it. It abuts Cow Bay and the Edgartown Golf Club, yet it never made a sound — a rare, in-town piece of the island that the world simply overlooked. We saw something else in it: the chance to build a private enclave nestled in town, wrapped in protected open land, where you can walk to the village, ride to the beach, and still hear nothing but the water and the birds.
A New Name, For What Lives Here
We did not rename this land to erase its past. We renamed it for what actually lives here.
This is protected ground — open space held for its wildlife, in the tradition set before us. Swans drift on the water. Herons wade the shallows. And above it all return the ospreys: the great fish hawks of the Vineyard, who come home to this water every spring and raise their young through the summer.
Season after season, we have watched them come close — unafraid, familiar, landing near us as though to say this is our home too, and we will share it with you. That trust, built over generations of birds, is the truest thing about this place. It is theirs first. Now it is ours to share, gently, together.
The osprey returns to the same nest each spring, for a lifetime.
In Tribute
Gus Ben David
The Vineyard's Naturalist · d. July 2024
The osprey's return to Martha's Vineyard is the life's work of one man. Gus Ben David — the island's beloved naturalist and the first director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary — spent more than half a century restoring these birds. Beginning in 1972, he and an all-volunteer crew raised nesting poles across the Vineyard and brought the osprey back from a single nesting pair to more than a hundred.
The osprey pole that stands at the heart of this land — here on Trapps Pond, now Osprey's Point — Gus raised with his own hands. He passed in the summer of 2024. We could not let his gift go unmarked.
A Living Tribute
Osprey's Point is named not for a man, but for the birds he brought to this water — under his guidance, and his dream. Without Gus, there would be no Osprey's Point. And so a plaque will rest upon the pole he raised, that all who come to know these birds will know the man behind them.
New chicks in the nest — a generation Gus made possible.
Generations
Each spring they return. Each summer, the island gathers to watch the young grow, test their wings, and take to the sky. The ospreys here know the water, and they have come to know the family who lives beside it — as they will come to know whoever calls this home next.
To own here is to inherit something rare: not only a home, but a place the island itself has chosen — and the quiet honor of becoming its steward, alongside the swans, the herons, and the birds who were here first.
Luxury · Privacy · A Whisper of Wealth
Come home to Osprey's Point.
A place on the island you don't simply own — you share it, gently, with everything that already belongs here.
